I Went Through America’s Extreme Vetting

I’m a Syrian refugee living in the United States. My family, which fled to Turkey in 2011 as protests against the government grew, is Muslim. And on Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would have made it difficult, if not impossible for me to find safety in America.

This executive order, which suspends visas for the citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries and calls for “extreme vetting,” isn’t just discriminatory and heartless – it doesn’t make any sense. Because in every conceivable way, the vetting process is already extremely thorough. I know this because I went through the process myself.

Story Continued Below

Over 15 months I was interviewed five times – in person, over the phone, by the United Nations and by the United States. They asked me about my family, my politics, my hobbies, my childhood, my opinions of the U.S., and even my love life. No less than four U.S. government agencies had the opportunity to screen me. By the time I received my offer to live in the United States, the U.S. officials in charge of my case file knew me better than my family and friends do.

In fact, there is probably nobody in the world that knows me better than the United States government. But that didn’t stop Trump from saying last December, “People are pouring in from regions of the Middle East. We have no idea who they are, where they come from.”

President Trump knows both who I am and where I’m from, and a whole lot more. If there is something else he’d like to know – anything short of my family renouncing its Syrian and Muslim identities – I can’t imagine what it might be.

Until the start of the civil war, I had never left Syria. But in 2011, my parents, my three sisters, my brother and I fled our coastal hometown of Latakia. We really didn’t have a choice – the regime knew that my father and I had participated in the protests, and government forces were on their way to occupy our city. If we stayed, we would have been killed.

When we arrived at the Turkish border, we camped there for two weeks, waiting for an international solution that would stop the fighting. None came, but with regime forces approaching, we asked the Turkish army for permission to cross the border. They took down our information, gave us refugee identification numbers, and brought us to camps.

By the time my family and I applied for resettlement in 2013, my family was living in Antakya, a city in southern Turkey. As a group, we walked into a refugee center run by the United Nations, gave them our basic information and formally applied. We got a call a week later, asking us to come for an interview in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, and two weeks after that we got on buses to take the nine-hour trip.

Riding on the bus that day, I had no idea that I was about to begin the longest application process of my life.

When we first arrived, the United Nations officials measured our height, our weight, took our fingerprints and our photos. Once every member of the family had been accounted for, they ushered us into our first interview. They asked what our religion was, what our politics were, where we went to school, what we were doing 10 years ago. I’m not religious, but my father answered for the family and said that we’re Muslim. After an hour, they split us up and interviewed individually. Then the questions got even more specific: “Why do you hate Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad?” “Why were you protesting?” “What’s your opinion of Barack Obama?” They asked about my friends, my relatives, who they are, where they are and what they do. When I told them that several of my friends had died in the uprising, they pressed for details. The interviewers checked for discrepancies in my story as they repeated to me the questions they had already asked my father. This went on for another two hours.

By the time our family headed home, we had divulged the majority of our life stories. But as it turns out, this was just an introductory interview. Two months later we were back on the bus, heading to Gaziantep, Turkey, for the next round. They asked us all of the same questions as before, but this time with follow-up questions and an aggressive attention to detail. “If Assad gives you freedom and democracy, why are you protesting him? What is it exactly that you want from him?” “Who were you protesting with? Were you involved with any groups?” My interviewer wanted to know all of my associations and connections, from before and during the revolution.

And this time, it was clear that the interviewer had done her research beforehand. She would follow up my answers with a pointed, “Are you sure?”, and she would ask questions that clearly had a right and a wrong answer. At one point, she asked me how long my family had camped on the border Turkish-Syrian border. I told her two weeks. She looked at me and inquired, “Two weeks, or more like 20 days?” I said yes, 20 days sounded about right.

Between the in-person interviews, I know that the officials handling my application were looking for anything, anything at all, that could disqualify me for resettlement. And when they thought they found something, they wouldn’t hesitate to follow up. A month after my second interview, I received a phone call out of the blue. The resettlement agency asked me about a field hospital I worked in for seven months, after we first arrived in Turkey. Did I know who owned it? Does he work with a jihadist group? Whose donations are funding this hospital? I told them I knew little – I was just working there, helping out. Their probing continued for half an hour.

By this point, my family had an online file. We could check the status of our application online, and we did check every day.

A few weeks after I received the phone call, our status was updated: The International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) had accepted our application for settlement in the United States. This did not mean the United States was accepting us as refugees; it just meant that the ICMC, which is a federally funded Resettlement Support Center, had accepted our application for consideration. There was no guarantee our application would succeed, and the American vetting process was just beginning.

Next we were on our way to Istanbul, a 15-hour bus ride from Antakya. The ICMC center we walked into felt like an embassy; beyond multiple security checkpoints was a flurry of activity, and the reception area was full of refugees from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, waiting for their chance at a new life.

As had happened during our first interview, the employees took our fingerprints and a variety of profile photos. This time, they even scanned our irises.

The interview went much the same way as before, repeating many of the same questions we had already heard. This time, there were more questions about the United States. If I lived in America, what would I want to do there? They wanted to know if I’d be interested in protesting in the United States, and what would I protest for? What are some good things and bad things about the United States? They even asked if I had a girlfriend, and if I did, would I want to bring her with me? During the entire two hours, cameras in the room were rolling.

My family grew accustomed to waiting – who knew when we would receive the next phone call? Maybe if we were rejected, we never would be told? I now know that as the months rolled by, I was being screened by any number of U.S. agencies, such as the State Department, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center, to name a few. For cases of Syrian refugees specifically, the Department of Homeland Security conducts an enhanced review.

Finally the phone call came in and we headed back to Istanbul, this time for an interview with the State Department. We were made to swear that everything we had said in past interviews was true, and told that if we made it to the United States and the government later discovered we had been lying about something in our past, we would be in major trouble. The U.S. officials mostly asked questions we’ve been asked before – biographical history, political affiliations, our reasons for protesting Assad. The officers asking the questions had been specially trained for this moment, the final interview in what had become a 15-month process. In many ways, I’m lucky – the average wait for a refugee applicant is 18 to 24 months. Or, at least it was.

With the final interview completed, and a few more months of waiting after that, I only had one barrier left: the medical check. This wasn’t a check-your-temperature, hit-your-knee-with-a-hammer kind of doctor’s appointment; this was a top-to-bottom, full-scale health assessment. They took blood samples, X-rayed most of my body and stripped me of my clothing. My eyes, and then my ears, were tested as healthy. All told, the medical examination was an eight-hour day.

Finally, after nearly a year and a half of being poked and prodded, physically and figuratively, I had been given clearance to start a new life in the United States. The U.S. government by then had a complete picture of who I am and who I’ve been. Getting through the five interviews was truly an exercise of autobiography, and if you told me beforehand the depth and breadth of United States’ vetting process, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. It was definitely extreme.

But not everyone in my family was given the same offer to move to the U.S. Only my sister and I were granted the opportunity, and my sister decided she didn’t want to part with her parents and other siblings. As for my mom and the others, after the final interview, they never heard back from the American resettlement agency. Luckily, they eventually received offers from other countries; my mom, my brother and one of my sisters are in Sweden, I have another sister in Germany, and my father is still in Turkey but hopes to join my mom in Sweden soon.

It’s almost beyond belief to me that anyone could mischaracterize the U.S. government’s vetting process as weak and insufficient, when it’s clearly anything but, to justify shutting the gate to millions of Syrian refugees. There is no way to look at my experience and the experience of tens of thousands of other refugees living in America and conclude that the country’s vetting system is not exhaustive and thorough.

To me, the real rationale behind Friday’s executive order is obvious: The president and his supporters do not trust people like me. Being both Syrian and Muslim (though I'm not personally religious) makes me doubly suspicious. I’m happy to be in the United States, a country I love. But it saddens me deeply to see what is happening here.